Was ‘Pride and Prejudice’ Inspired by Jane Austen’s First Love?

“Pride and Prejudice” whose 200th birthday we celebrate this year, is the work of a young woman in the joy and giddiness of her first love. Jane Austen had met Tom Lefroy over Christmas, 1795-96 when they both turned 20.

Lefroy was the Irish-born nephew of Benjamin Langlois, a wealthy diplomat and politician who lived in London. He acted as a patron to a number of his nieces and nephews, including Tom, who had just completed his studies at Trinity College in Dublin. Langlois encouraged his study of law at Lincoln’s Inn so that he would be in a position to help out his many siblings. He admired Tom, and considered that he had “everything in his temper and character that can conciliate affections. A good heart, a good mind, good sense, and as little to correct in him as ever I saw in one of his age.”

Tom was also the nephew of George Lefroy, another recipient of Langlois’s patronage, having been given the living at Ashe, a village near the Austen’s home in Steventon, Hampshire. It was to meet these other relations that Tom came into Jane’s life during a break in his studies.

Anne Lefroy, Tom’s aunt, was a favorite of Jane, and it’s probable that she had spoken to Jane about this Irish paragon, and that she may even have had a matchmaking scheme in mind. At one point in Tom’s visit, she had planned a ball, called it off, and then reinstated it. That generosity might have been impelled by her wanting to give Tom and Jane another chance to be together.

Jane’s sister, Cassandra, was visiting the family of her fiancé, Tom Fowle, who was about to sail to the West Indies. Somebody had written Cassandra that Jane was acting improperly. In the very first letter we have of Austen’s, Jane wrote her:

“You scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have this moment received from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself, however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you.”

She wrote nothing of her hopes, and kept her comments about Tom to the safely humorous. “He has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove—it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine as he did when he was wounded.”

That is all the knowledge we have for certain about the meetings between Tom and Jane. In only the third letter we have of hers, from August, 1796, seven months after she and Tom parted, she wrote from London en route to visit a brother’s family. Curiously, she wrote from Cork Street, on which Langlois lived. Was she meeting Tom? Was she visiting Langlois to give him a chance to approve her?

She may also have met Tom in Bath, in late 1797, when the Austens made a long visit there. Tom may have accompanied the Lefroys who traveled from Ashe to Bath at the same time the Austens were there, to attend the performance of one of their daughters in a horse show. Not only are we not certain of these meetings, but we can’t judge what they may have meant.

However, by the time of their possible meeting in Bath, Tom had already been engaged for about six months. He had proposed to Mary Paul, the sister of on one of his school friends, in the spring of 1797. But it would seem that Jane had not been told.

Whatever her hopes for Tom were, they were dashed a year after the visit to Bath. In November 1978, Tom seems to have come again to Ashe, without meeting her. She learned this from a visit from Mrs. Lefroy.

A hurt Jane wrote Cassandra: “Mrs Lefroy did come last Wednesday… I was alone to hear all that was interesting, which you will easily credit when I tell you that of her nephew she said nothing at all…She did not once mention the name of [Tom] to me, and I was too proud to make any enquiries; but on my father’s afterwards asking where he was, I learnt that he was gone back to London in his way to Ireland, where he is called to the Bar and means to practise.”

Neither Jane nor Cassandra ever married. Cassandra’s fiancé died of a fever in the West Indies in February 1797.

In his later years Lefroy said he’d loved Jane with a “boyish love.” He became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, and who gives a fig for that? Jane, who while still in the gleaming spring of her first love, sat down to write the book that makes almost every list of the great novels in English.

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In 2003, the BBC launched the “The Big Read,” asking its audience to nominate their favorite books. More than 750,000 people responded, and “Pride and Prejudice” came in second of their top 100. It would have been first but they must have let teenage boys vote, because the first-place winner was “Lord of the Rings.” An earlier survey of librarians in America placed it at the top of their list of 100, where it rightly belongs.

More proof of how much Austen is loved is the ultimate praise: imitation. Georgette Heyer came along in the 1930s and invented a wildly popular genre that became “Regency romance,” and still read by respectable people today. Regencies are a booming slice of the romance market, characterized usually by one of two themes, the rise of a Cinderella, or the sparring of a Kate and Petruchio. You can look for a heroine plucked from nowhere by a rich and titled Englishman, or who is his equal but despises him. I know; years ago I wrote one of each.

The burgeoning of imitators doesn’t end there. More and more novels have been published that use Austen herself or her characters; P.D.James’s “Death Comes to Pemberley” is one.

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We have Lefroy to thank for stirring up the feelings that poured out into “Pride and Prejudice.” But had Jane not been writing since she was 12, in a family that welcomed her efforts and celebrated them, she could not have created such polished, precocious perfection. Her father was a vicar, educated at Oxford, and open-minded about his daughter’s reading and her efforts to write. Two of her brothers also studied at Oxford, and two others at the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth, both rising to the rank of admiral.

She imitated almost every contemporary genre in small pieces she dedicated to her members of her family. Her father, never a rich man, had an impressive library of more than 500 books to which she had unlimited access. The plays the family put on no doubt helped her hone her skills writing conversation, one of the chief pleasures of her works.

These early works have not been lost to the world. R. W. Chapman collected them as “Minor Works.” Some of them rank as classics of silliness.

These are my favorite gems from “Love and Freindship” [sic] written when she was about 14.

“My Father started—“What noise is that,” (said he.) “It sounds like a loud rapping at the Door”—(replied my Mother.) “it does indeed.” (cried I.) “I am of your opinion; (said my Father)…”Yes (exclaimed I) I cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for Admittance…”

“Beware of swoons Dear Laura…A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the Body & if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to Health in its consequences—Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—”.

Another favorite of her early pieces is her reasoned and impartial rendering of the History of England, with artwork by Cassandra. Mary Tudor was “succeeded by that disgrace to humanity, that pest of society, Elizabeth. Many were the people who fell Martyrs to the Protestant Religion during [Mary’s] reign; I suppose not fewer than a dozen. She married Philip King of Spain who in her Sister’s reign was famous for building Armadas. She died without issue, & then the dreadful moment came in which the destroyer of all comfort, the deceitful Betrayer of trust reposed in her, & the Murderess of her Cousin [Mary Queen of Scots] succeeded to the Throne.”

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Within months of her happy Christmas with Lefroy, this extraordinary 20-year-old sat down to write “First Impressions,” which after revisions would become“Pride and Prejudice.”

It is the tale of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy who meet, take a dislike to each other, wound each other; he shapes up, she notices, they marry and move to the fantasy heaven that is Pemberley.

To what extent the characters represent either Jane or Tom Lefroy is unknowable, except that Jane and Elizabeth share a sense of humor, a loathing of cant, and a courageous heart.

In 1800, Jane’s father, George Austen decided to give the living to his oldest son, James, and move the family—himself, his wife, Jane and Cassandra—to Bath. This shock to Jane—she is said to have fainted at the news—signaled the beginning of a great silence. She wrote few letters, and completed no novels until she was finally settled in the peace and privacy of a house, in Chawton in 1809. As traumas go, it would seem that she could survive the loss of Tom, but the loss of a home was the one that upended her.

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She was nonetheless very young and full of joy as she wrote “Pride and Prejudice.” The wit of the novel is far more sophisticated than in her endearing early writing, and eternally fresh. We all have our favorite parts: Here are some of mine: first, anything having to do with Mr. Collins.

Then: “I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!” “I do not cough for my own amusement.” “It is your turn, to say something now, Mr. Darcy.—I talked about the dance, and you ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the room, or the number of couples.”

When Elizabeth’s sister is mortifying the family in company by singing with off-key interminableness, she implores her father to stop her, and he does so, saying, “That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough!”

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Her father had sent off “First Impressions” to a publisher in 1797, and it was rejected. It was not to see the light of day for 17 years, when she was 37. (She would die four years later, at 41, leaving us bereft with only six completed novels.)

But finally, on January 28, 1813, the novel with the most famous opening line in literature, appeared in three volumes to critical praise and popularity and a meager payment of £110–she had hoped for £150. The opening line, of course, is “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Austen’s delight at finally holding it in her hands, is moving. “I want to tell you, that I have got my own darling Child from London…”

“Upon the whole,” she wrote Cassandra,”the work is rather too light & bright & sparkling; –it wants shade; –it wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter—of sense if it could be had, if not of solemn specious nonsense—about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte—or anything that would form a contrast & bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness & Epigrammatism of the general stile.”

Did she ever speak of Tom Lefroy or write about him? She may have heard from the Lefroys that Tom called his wife, “Mabs.” In “Sense and Sensibility,” the name of Willoughby’s horse was…”Queen Mab.”

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